Customer Experience

Have you ever added a custom tool bar on your office set up? Have your non-techy friends and family changed the background image on their desktop or changed their screen saver. Is there a demand for customisation?

So here’s the question. Do people really want to make your homepage look the way they want it to? Is there a demand for iGoogle and netvibes customisation? They look cool and are attractive to the geeks in us, but do they have mass market appeal? Is there any research out there on the take up of user customisation?

“…back when Windows 95 was released, users could easily change My computer to something more personal. Apple users had been able to do this for many years, and many of them did name their computers. But few Windows users took the opportunity to do this, suggesting that they saw the computer as more of a tool than something with which they wanted to have a personalized relationship.” (David Malouf)

Just because we can doesn’t mean that we should. When you log into your bank account it could look like netvibes, complete with BBC news feeds and YouTube videos (you decide what you want). But should it?

Why should your customers see your website as something to have a personalized relationship with, especially if you don’t engage them with a personal relationship throguh your other channels?

IVR, (that’s the automated routing of phone calls) is an unpleasant reality of multi-channel service. Let’s assume that you are committed to using it, how much time have you spent in creating the messaging. Two examples of trying to put a more human touch to something that is inherently not human and machine driven.

Firstly the Halifax. Listen carefully to what happens after you key in an option. You here a key click. You are then prompted to enter your account number. “thanks” the voice says, “I’ll just enter that”. And you hear a clackerty clack of data being entered into a keyboard. BUT YOU ARE A MACHINE!!! It is a nice touch, but it is trying to make an interaction that is clearly not human more personable.

Second example is the Financial Obudsman. “Thank you for calling” says the voice. Not a stock, model voice, but a real voice, “I hope we’ll be able to help you. My name is Walter Merricks and I am the Chief Ombudsman…” The message is clearly a recording. There is no attempt to be anything but a recording, but giving the voice a name and explaining the nature of IVR is a real human touch. Even better, the narrative about recording the call- it is not scripted from the IVR manual. It talks to the customer in language they understand.

If you must be mechanical in your communications with customers, be human, be transparent, but don’t try and pretend to be what you are not.

I was recently talking to some IT professionals. We were talking about customer journeys and understanding the customer needs. They were second guessing these, making assumptions about what is important to the customer how how the customer would best interact with the application.

“How about running a focus group with customers?” I suggested. Blank expressions. “Not sure” came the response, “we’ve never done those before”.

But you have done that before. Every time you run a workshop with the business, that is a focus group. The listening skills are the same. Effective facilitation, and using stimuli to promote debate, elicit opinions and test ideas- they are the same. You just have a different audience and call focus groups something different.

IT should have no fear of talking to real customers, end users. Getting them together in workshops is something that should come as naturally to IT as it does to the marketeers. Let’s get focus groups into the vocabulary of any IT project.

There may be a niche in the market, but is there a market for the niche?

How do you create a successful proposition? If the answer was obvious there wouldn’t be so many failures out there in the market place.

It is easy to commence on a journey of product development with a hunch and clearly there is no substitute for validating ideas in the flesh. That something at ThoughtWorks we do; helping clients test and learn, rapidly building ideas into tangibles that can be piloted at low cost and low risk before investing in significant build and spend. However, sometimes a little more rigour is required before you commit to commencing a project in earnest.

That rigour needs to be focused. What often happens is this rigour turns into a research phase that turns into a project itself. It need not be this way. There are certain things you can do, certain questions to ask as you set out on the journey of creating a new, compelling customer proposition. What follows then is a strawman customer value proposition model to help test potential propositions before moving forward with them. There are three components to the value proposition model; the customer, the environmental context and the organisation or company.

All too often propositions are rooted in the organisation. They make assumptions about the demand or usage. This model attempts to broaden the analysis and focus upon the customer and the why the proposition will be attractive to them. The model supports questions that may be asked to help shape thinking, test hypotheses and validate thinking.

I do not propose that this should become a major research exercise (for example market sizing is a huge effort in itself), rather a tool for asking the right questions, and if the answers are hard to come by, maybe that suggests more thought is required in refining the proposition.

So here goes, a model that provides a framework for considering new customer value propositions. It’s just an initial idea and I’d welcome feedback and suggestions.

Customer

Before you get too carried away with the proposition, a good starting point would be the customer. Who are they and what do they do. Let’s remember that your customer is not everybody. Your proposition in unlikely to be appealing 24/7. The challenge is to segment your target market and identify the triggers for action.

The persona: Who do?

Personas are a useful tool for bringing the customer to life. Much has been written about them, but they are a useful tool for extracting broad data into specific stories that describe individuals. Realise that it is unlikely you will design for everybody. Start with the market that you are targeting, how large is it and what is its propensity to spend? Then within that target market segment the target customer base into different profile customers (personas). You need to understand which persona, which customer profile is most important – prioritise them and focus on the highest value. This may mean deciding between high volume, low margin mass market and low volume, high margin niche appeal. This decision needs to be made as early as possible to ensure the proposition remains focused and doesn’t try to be all things to all people, satisfying none.

Values, needs, wants and desires

People are not empty vessels waiting to consume and be filled with your proposition. Their behaviour is driven by their values, needs, wants and desire. These may be fundamentally rational (to satisfy a basic human goal) or emotional (to demonstrate status). They are cultural and time based. Thinking in these terms helps you understand how the proposition will appeal to the customer at different levels. Let’s take an example of this; a new mobile phone.

Before we think about what the product must do, what are the values that the persona associates with the phone. Is our target market a technophile or a technophobe? Jan Chipchase who works for Nokia includes ethnography in his research to understand how people use their phones; women carry them in their handbags, men in their pockets or their belts.

The basic need that the phone must meet to satisfy the customer, she must be able to make and receive calls. If the product is unable to meet these needs it is not fit for purpose and the phone proposition will inevitably fail.

Just making phone calls meets the need but there are additional wants that should be satisfied for the product to be more compelling. It’s a hassle to remember the number of every person she rings, the customer wants to be able to store numbers and see the number of the person who is calling.

Having the ability to see a photograph of her daughter as a screen saver on her phone is neither a need not a want. The phone is useful and usable without that. But the customer desires to personalise her phone by having a picture of her daughter on it. Desirability is the key differentiator of the iPhone. It doesn’t need to compete on features, it is a cool device that people talk about. And here is a key decision you need to make on your proposition journey. Are you looking to compete on parity or whether you want to make a difference.

Questions

What is the basic need that the proposition is trying to fulfil?

What counts as hygiene?

What does the customer need to be satisfied?

What does the customer want in addition to being just satisfied

What do other competive products do to maintain feature parity (if you feel you really need to compete on features alone – bad move!)

Few people would argue they don’t want simplicity and clarity in their interactions with products. How could your product to make life easier for the customer?

What will make the customer feel good in themselves about owning the product?

What other products are “cool” or desirable to your target market. How can you leverage the essence of those products?

Context

So now we are beginning to understand who the customer is, it is time to nest the proposition in terms of their context. The old maxim that a half drunk bottle of water in a desert is worth its weight in gold, but on the streets of a city is worthless trash, should be remembered. Even the best of propositions will deliver little value if they not only consider the customer, but also the context in which they apply: time, demand and usage.

Trigger

So the next step in the model is to ask why, when and how will the customer be attracted to the proposition. What is the trigger that drives the customer to move from awareness (assuming you have that) to action? There is no point in a financial services company trying to sell me a car loan if I am wealthy enough to own my own car, or I do not drive. Understand what triggers the customer to be interested in the proposition, when and why this happens. How can your proposition be at front of mind when the trigger is set.

External events that they have no control over (think about sports sponsorship and tying a proposition to that sport, or tying a proposition to a celebrity e.g. Michael Jackson..)

Environment

It is very unlikely that the proposition will be wholly unique. What is the competitive landscape, what noise will it need to be heard above to capture the consumers attention. Whilst you may review the immediate competitors to see where threats and opportunities lie, what can you learn from other, unrelated products or domains? How can you fuse together concepts from outside your immediate focus to bring new innovation to your product? Scenario planning may come in useful, playing out different outcomes for different timelines other than that which you plan for.

Questions

What is the competitive landscape?

What can you learn about similar but unrelated propositions?

Have you considered the political, environmental social and technical influences using the old PEST analysis?

Have you considered different scenarios and how your proposition would play out under them; what unplanned disruptors could get in the way, or how could your proposition done differently disrupt the market?

The experience engine

Enough of the customer and externalities, what will the proposition look like and why will the target customer go with it? There are three engines within the organisation that drive the proposition, the experience, delivery and value engines. So…

Utility

To be any good, the product has got to offer basic utility. It has to do what it says it is going to do. Sadly, too many products and customer propositions end there. A utility product will match the consumers needs. This is where most enterprise software sits…

What are the key customer needs that the proposition must fulfil?

What is the basic core functionality that must be met, what are the features that must be offered to gain traction in the market place?

What features that are typical on competitor products that we could do without?

Quality

I could call this next box usability (as this follows the UXD model) but I think it goes beyond just usability. What is the quality of not only the immediate interface, but also with the supporting functions? For example, if you have a call centre to back up the proposition, how many layers of IVR are you forced through?

Have you considered usability?

Is the packaging aesthetically pleasing?

The “happy path” customer journey may be well framed, but what about the “sad path”? What about when things go wrong, what about when customers don’t act in the way you expect of predict them to act?

Brand

It is easy to get carried away with a new idea before thinking about what it means to the brand. Typically there will be a strategic roadmap and whilst the proposition may be attractive it may not fit into where the brand is going.

Is the proposition complementary to the overall brand direction or does it require a new brand and identity?

Does the proposition support / leverage the brand?

Does the brand already ‘do it’ under another guise (are you reinventing a wheel that has already been tried somewhere, sometime in the organisation’s history?)

How will it be marketed?

Community

Finally, what is the ‘buzz’ that the proposition will create, what will get people talking and sharing it and how will you create this buzz.

Is there a social network component built in that gets people talking and connected? How will it get people talking in external networks?

What will cause people to recommend it to others?

How can customers become part of its evolution?

What of the proposition will get people passionate, what will drive them away?

Delivery engine

People

A successful proposition needs not only a talented, passionate and committed team to deliver it to market, it also needs a similar team to run it and support it when it is live. It is a common failing for a rogue “skunkworks” team to emerge in an organisation and develop what appears a compelling proposition, only to have it knocked back and closed down by the “Business as Usual” processes inherent in the organisation

Who do you need to make the proposition successful? What is the team?

Who will create the proposition and who will lead it? Is it IT led or business led?

What are the cross-organisational boundaries that the proposition crosses and how will these be eliminated?

Who will take ownership of the proposition once it crosses over into the market?

Process

What are the processes that will be required to sustain the proposition?

If the proposition will require changes to the organisation, how will they be managed, communicated and rolled out?

How will the proposition be supported once it is let loose in the market?

How will it be communicated to customers?

How will you create new sales – sales force.

Technology

What is the technology that will underpin the proposition?

Is it possible to test the ideas using rapid languages such as Ruby on Rails before committing it to the enterprise Java stack?

What integration is really necessary and what can be worked around?

How can you deliver a beta version in the shortest period of time?

How will you avoid heavyweight frameworks and develop incrementally to deliver value early and often?

How performant and scalable must the innovation be?

Value Engine

At its most simplistic, how much will the proposition cost and how much revenue will it generate? Does it offer cost saving opportunities? Are there intangible benefits that will be accrued? Ultimately is it a viable proposition that is worth pursuing, or will the cost to develop and run outweigh the value it will add? Building out a financial model can take time, in the first instance this should be a napkin analysis, a wake-up call to make sure there is value in the proposition before too much time is invested in it.

Cost

Every day someone is working on the proposition it is costing you money. The quicker you can get something to market the faster you will start seeing a return on your investment, similarly the sooner you can “get something out there”, “test and learn” the sooner you can kill a proposition that does not fulfill its promise.

How quickly can you get a beta to market?

How many people, how many days?

What will the cost be to develop the infrastructure?

Do you have the skills in house or will you need to go external?

Benefit / Revenue

At its most crude, how will the proposition make money, but there may be more to what we wish to achieve. Is the proposition actually going to cut costs, a result of regulatory pressures or a CSR initiative?
What are the benefits that will be accrued – both tangible (e.g. financial) and intangible (e.g. social, environmental etc)

If you are selling units are you going for high volume low margin or low volume high margin?

If it an on-line proposition “advertising” is often seen as the source of revenue.

There are two additional components to the model…

Implementation

Having a compelling proposition is one thing, it is another to successfully communicate it and roll it out to target customers.

In a crowded market place, how will the proposition stand out?

What are the brand values it will communicate?

What is the story that customers will hear and how will they hear that story?

How will customers interact with the proposition, what channels will you use to take it to market?

What is the roll out strategy?

Retain and grow

Winning customers is only the first step. A successful proposition will maintain a long-term relationship with its profitable customers, maintaining the warmth they have to the original proposition and cross-selling and up-selling new ones.

How will you retain them and turn them into repeat customers and passionate advocates of the proposition?

How will the proposition grow lifetime customer value?

What can be cross-sold or up-sold?

What can you bundle?

How will the proposition deal with churn?

OK, so it’s not a perfect model and by no means complete. There’s some duplication in the thinking and many questions missing, but as any model it can be used to guide and prompt thinking and ensure there are no elephants left in the room when the first line of code gets cut. I’d welcome any comments on its usefulness, utility and direction.

Over the loudspeaker comes a garbled message “…this train divides at Chester. Customers for Bangor must travel in the front four coaches of the train”.
There was a group of women behind me talking loudly, one of them picked out part of the message and was worried. The train guard (sorry, Customer Revenue Protection Officer) walked by.
One of the women got his attention, “Excuse me, we’re going to Bangor?” she said.
“Oh” said the guard. “You need to get out at Milton Keynes and walk to the front of the train”.
“What? We need to change trains?” the woman replied.
“No, it is the same train, just the front part of it.”
“Is it on the same platform?” Asked the woman.
“Yes, just walk up a little” replied the guard.
“We don’t need to cross over to another platform then?”
“No, it is the same platform, the same train”
“So why can’t we stay on this train then”
“Because this part of the train divides at Chester?”
“But we’re not going to Chester, we’re going to Bangor”
The guard was getting frustrated, “when the train stops at the next station, you just need to get out and walk up the platform, in fact to the next carraige and get on the train there”
“So why can’t we walk through the train to the next carraige?”
“Because it is a different train”
“but this train is going to Bangor isn’t it? We are on the right train aren’t we?”

And so on until a fellow passenger jumped in “when we get to Milton Keynes, I’ll show you where to go” and at Milton Keynes he led them all off the train to walk past the train divide on the platform and I’ll assume they made it to Bangor in one peice.

The point of this narative is that not everybody “gets it”. Just because you think something is straight forward or obvious doesn’t mean that your customers will. You are not your customer, be wary of making assumptions on how people will use your Great New Product.

Dolls are girls stuff. I don’t count Action Man (Which I had a few of as a youngster) dolls. But being a Daddy of two girls, dolls start to be part of my world. Wandering down Michigan avenue in Chicago on Saturday I stumbled across American Girl. Not only have they have elevated the doll beyond a product and into an experience, they have created an experience around the buying and owning of their dolls. The product, the doll, is almost secondary to the narrative. Every doll has a back story, indeed they come with a paperback to describe this story. Books build on this story, as do DVDs computer games as well as the dolls clothes, furniture and accessories all extending the product experience.

Wandering around the store I passed the doll hair salon (dolls sitting on doll-sized hairdressers chairs with their hair being plaited, braided, styled, blow dried…), the hospital (fixing broken dolls, returned to the owner wearing a hospital gown and discharge certificate), the historical doll museum (dolls representing children from different eras)… Walking into the American Girl I had no intention of spending any money there. I ended up buying two dolls and clothes, I bought into the experience and took home to my girls not just presents from Daddy’s worldwide travels but also a story to tell.

Dolls are a product that it is (arguably) easy to create stories, narrative and experience around. It is easy to provide this as a case study, but harder for a completely unrelated industry (such as financial services) to learn anything from it. Harder, but not impossible. Look at comparethemarket and the way they are building a story with Aleksandr around what is a pretty dull product. As you develop a new product or application, can you build a narrative that supports the product? Once you start telling a story, what new insights come to mind? How can you build an experience beyond the immediate product?

A year ago we arrived in Hong Kong with no TV, but a Mac Mini, broadband connection and a stack of DVDs from the UK. When the DVDs were all watched we turned to the local video shop to hire or buy DVDs. Only they would not work. Hong Kong is in a different region to the UK. The DRM of dinosaur logic does not allow you to be an international traveler. If we wanted to buy new DVDs in Hong Kong we would have to make a decision to effectively throw away our UK DVDs. And it was then that we really discovered Bit Torrent…

“Maybe this experience will help the British government understand how many of the entertainment industry’s efforts to strengthen intellectual property controls do little more than irritate legitimate consumers.”

I flew back into London early on Monday morning from Singapore on a Qantas codeshare with British Airways. The in-flight BA experience was flawless, after thirteen and a half hours in the air we touched down fifteen minutes early. No problems with passport control and then I hit baggage collection.

The baggage carousels weren’t turning. A number of arrived long haul flights were listed with an ‘awaiting carousel’ message. Frustration was in the air. I wandered towards the British Airways service counter interested to see how BA were handling this customer experience issue. Not very well was what I saw.

“Look! just stop complaining and let us do our job” shouted the ‘Team Supervisor’ at an irate customer who had been waiting for almost an hour. Rather than providing information, transparency and honesty, the face of BA was shouting at customers with a ‘jobsworth‘ attitude. All that good work on the plane was lost. A dozen or so customers witnessed the rude abuse that the employee was ranting. This maybe acceptable if you are Ryanair and your brand is not built upon customer experience, but for BA it most certainly is not.

Unfortunatly my phone battery was dead, otherwise I would have recorded the interaction for your viewing pleasure. Then it would not have been a dozen people who witnessed the terrible customer service. More than 366,000 people have viewed South West airlines seven hours on the tarmac (and google returns almost 19,000 results for “south west airlines 7 hours on plane tarmac“). Employees need to understand that they are brand ambassadors, in a world where video cameras are ubiquitous poor customer service goes beyond the word of mouth, it now becomes viral.

Bruce Temkin shows the below ‘experience wheel’ that lego use for designing customer experiences. It is relevant as it touches the airline experience, mapping all the customer touchpoints, and what the make or break moments are. This is a useful exercise that BA could learn from. Delivering a compelling customer experience with your core services is no longer enough, anywhere that your brand touches customers must be excellent.

All airlines are the same. They fly the same planes to the same airports for (roughly) the same prices. What differentiates them? Attention to detail. It’s not just the functional detail – it’s the experiential detail that really makes the difference.

It’s the same with software. If the application you are building was an airline, which airline would it be? All to often developers focus on the plane, building something to fulfil the utility of getting people from A to B. Yet the customer doesn’t care about whether it’s an Airbus A330 or a Boeing 777, what they care about, and what they remember is the experience they have.

(This can be a useful exercise at the outset of a new project, ask stakeholders to imagine their finished applciation was an airline, what brand would it be? This helps anchor expectations; are you building a full service Singapore Airlines or a no-frills EasyJet?)

According to an article on eMarketer the method customers book travel depends upon their needs. Nothing revolutionary there; what is interesting is that fewer travelers are booking their trips online overall.

“This is not due to personal financial concerns—online travel bookers are an affluent demographic,” Mr. Grau [senior analyst at eMarketer] said. “Rather, it is caused by frustrations related to the planning and booking capabilities of OTAs (on-line travel agents). This, in turn, is spurring a renewed appreciation for the expertise and personalized services offered by traditional travel agents.”

“Online travel bookers are an affluent demographic” and yet we continue to let them down with poor customer experiences and an inability to let them do what they want to do. As an e-marketeer, your sales numbers may be satisfactory, but how much more traction could you get if your customer interactions were more realistically modeled around their behaviours and their intentions. You may point to your personalization engine, but that is probably doing little more than offering up pages and offers based upon information the customer has told you, or prior pages they have visited. It is not going to be a challenge to “the expertise and personalized services offered by traditional [insert domain here] agents“.

So we can do something about the technology to provide a better customer experience, but that won’t be enough. The perfect customer experience will not fit in business rules your IT analysts have determined. In the real world, corner cases and ‘exceptions to the rule’ are abound. In the real world sales people, customer service reps (or their supervisors) have ‘management discretion’. They can listen to the customer, understand their story, recognise them as a loyal customer who made a mistake, and override the business rules to satisfy/ delight the customer in a way the cold logic of the business rules never considered. True personalization will focus upon the corner-case long-tail.

The next generation of eCommerce will be declarative, forgiving and understanding. Rather than being based upon a paradigm that is the result of the technical constraints of the channels early days, it will be something that more closely mirrors the real world. Getting there however will be difficult. As a first step Marketing departments need to address the shortcomings of their existing digital channel before their IT organisation embarks on new channels such as mobile and TV.

Marc McNeill

For more than a decade Marc has been a passionate advocate of placing the customer at the heart of business, working with clients in finance, retail, government and entertainment sectors, helping them craft compelling cross channel customer experiences. Marc champions lean and agile approaches for making customer driven innovation happen. He co-authored the book Agile Experience Design. As a consultant with ThoughtWorks he brought design thinking and creativity to clients, engaging across their organisations with a focus on delivery as well as ideas. Today he is Customer Experience Director at Auto Trader. He has been known to dance and is rather partial to mangos.